New pinwheel star system discovered

Scientists have discovered a new, large star system within the Milky Way galaxy that challenges existing theories of how massive stars eventually die. “This system is probably going the first of its kind ever discovered in our own galaxy,” aforesaid Benjamin Pope, a NASA Sagan fellow at new york University in the US. The scientists detected a gamma-ray burst progenitor system — a sort of supernova that blasts out a very powerful and narrow jet of plasma and that is assumed to occur only in distant galaxies.

“It wasn’t expected such a system would be found in our galaxy — only in younger galaxies much more away,” said Pope. “Given its brightness, it’s shocking it had been not discovered a lot sooner,” Pope said. The system, described within the journal Nature astronomy, and has been dubbed “Apep”.

An calculable 8,000 light years away Earth, the system is adorned with a dust “pinwheel” — whose unusually slow motion suggests current theories on star deaths is also incomplete. once the most large stars in our universe close to the end of their lives, they turn out fast winds — generally moving at over 1,000 kilometers per second — that carry away massive amounts of a star’s mass. These fast winds ought to carry away the star’s move energy and slow it down long before it dies.